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LEGISLATIVE BRANCH |
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LEGISLATIVE BRANCH |
Legislation |
Congress |
Agencies, News |
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Descriptions of the Links
Primary source Congressional documents: bill text, bill summaries and legislative status, public laws, vetoed bills, Congressional Record text and Congressional Record Index, Résumés of Congressional Activity, Days-in-session calendars, committee reports, House and Senate roll call votes, explanations of the legislative process, historic Congressional documents, and more. All data browsable and searchable.Hearings in Thomas are the committee's web version, which is not usually the authoritative copy. This copy only contains the written submissions by witnesses. For a transcript of the oral testimony, see the version on the GPO Access site.
Primary source for the full text of Congressional documents: bills, Congressional Record, Congressional Record Index, public laws, committee reports, Committees (members, jurisdiction, hearings, rules), House and Senate calendars, History of Bills, Congressional Documents, U.S. Code, Economic Indicators, Congressional (pictorial) Directory.The interface is not as friendly as Thomas's, and the texts are either in ASCII text format (which is unattractive) or in PDF (which takes a while to download) and are not cross-linked to the bill-status, as in Thomas. However, for hearings and the Congressional Record, the GPO version is the official version, and may be more authoritative than the Thomas version.
C-SPAN's Vote Library will give you the major roll call votes by date and by broad subject category. You will want to get the bill number from either Thomas or GPO Access first. Suggested: check under "Major Legislation" in Thomas. C-SPAN advertises a directory of votes by member, but the link fails. If you want to see votes by a member, try the directory from Congress.org. Both the Senate and House homepages have complete Roll call votes by date also.
A Century of Lawmaking, from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress. Journals of Congress, Annals, and Statutes from 1774 to 1873.
A librarian's guide to legislative sources, including GPO Access, the House of Representatives, Library of Congress LOCIS (Federal legislation databases via telnet), the Senate, THOMAS (Library of Congress Web-based legislative information), other sources of legislation, and how to locate Members of Congress. Includes Schankman's own "how-to" guides for searching GPO Access, LOCIS, and THOMAS.
A guide to finding bills, committee documents, floor debates, votes, and laws.
The Homepage for the House, one can find a House Directory (not recommended), House Office Web Sites (Member, Committee, Leadership, House Organizations, Commissions and Task Forces), House Media Galleries This Week on the House Floor, Annual Congressional Schedule, and complete Roll Call Votes by vote number.
Categories include: Legislative Activities, Senators, Committees, Learning About the Senate, Visiting the Senate, Contacting the Senate, Roll Call Votes, and Search.
Search by name, state, or zip code. This directory of the members of the current Congress, with their addresses, email addresses, homepage links, brief biographical facts, committee assignments, staff listings, and selected votes on major legislation.
This directory is searchable by Congressmember and by zip code. It does not have much more than the standard information available in other directories (Congress.org's for example), but one special feature is that it has a link to a map showing the member's local district office.
Contains biographies of all members of the national legislature from 1774 to the present, including representatives, senators, presidents, vice presidents, and delegates to the Continental Congress. Searchable by name, state, and position. Some entires include a bibliography and guide to research collections. Many entries are illustrated.
A non-partisan federal candidate campaign money page, 1993-94 to date; political-action-committee and individual contributor by candidate: "who gave what to which Federal candidates when." Based on U.S. Federal Election Commission data.
The GAO investigates government operations and audits departments of government at the request of members of congress. The Comptroller General also issues decisions. These are all available here.
The CBO conducts projections for the U.S. Economy and for the Federal Budget. Those projections and their complete publications are available here.
The CRS conducts in-depth research at the request of members of Congress. The CRS reports are not systematically published by the government, but several sites provide the full text to selected recent reports. This site at the University of Colorado pulls all of the various fugitive CRS sites together in one list.
The Library of Congress has many projects and web sites in addition to its Thomas site. It also has a copyright database, and a very large catalog of books.
A site to find texts of bills, voting records, legislative RSS feeds and blogs.
Political news from CNN and Time Magazine.
C-SPAN provides gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. House and other public affairs programming. Their web site includes Congressional votes library, Member and committee directory information, congressional e-mail, program schedules, House floor schedules, live audio and video of House and Senate floors. (RealPlayer software available free from C-SPAN site. Your computer must have speakers and video graphics capability.)
For candidates and elected officials, provides biographies, information on campaign finances, issue positions, performance ratings, and voting records, an educational guide to the U.S. Government, CongressTrack, and other political links.
This site keeps track of legislation that specifically designates funds for a particular project rather than leaving the decision as to how to apportion the funds to an executive agency. In other words, it keeps track of earmarks in federal legislation.
